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Elvis Costello, the British pheenom, could hardly have picked a better place to open his first American tour than San Francisco. As an import, his debut lp, My Aim Is True, had been airing for months on KSAN, the area's leading FM outlet; avant-garde record stores like Berkeley's Rather Ripped had sold every copy they could get hold of. By the time Costello touched these shores, Columbia, the bonus baby's new label, had his album in the shops and other FM stations were falling into line. Costello himself did his best to make his presence felt, materializing at a Randy Newman concert, at the Mabuhay Gardens, a punk venue, and on KSAN, where in the course of an interview he claimed both that "Elvis" is his given name and that his organist had never listened to ? and the Mysterians. And his legend had preceded him: this twenty-two-year-old former computer operator, everyone seemed to know, was the man who had told Nick Kent of New Musical Express that his songs are motivated solely by "revenge and guilt," the only emotions he understands; who hates the music business so much he's keeping a blacklist against the day he seizes power; who wants to die before he gets old: "I'd rather kill myself. ... I'm not going to be around to witness my artistic decline." There is genius in the wording of that last line, and it was already in the songs ("I said I'm so happy I could die / She said drop dead and left with another guy"), an acrid rockabilly sound and a punk point of view reduced to a dead stare. The sold-out crowd of six hundred that squeezed into the Old Waldorf was ready for whatever it was Elvis Costello had to offer, or inflict.
Playing rhythm and attempting lead guitar, Costello onstage is serious, impersonal, and not quite all there; his band — organ, bass, and drums — is straight out of the Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream." "Psycho music," a friend said with approval, as Costello ate the mike and launched into "Night Rally," a doomstruck, as-yet-unrecorded attack on Britain's neofascist National Front. "They're putting your name in the forbidden book," he spat out. "I know what they're doing, but I don't wanna look." The man doesn't exactly exude equanimity.
The crowd was mad for Costello — and any number of his performances, from "Alison" to "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," were direct and hard — but I think there was a certain amount of autohype involved. The band, punk in looks and to a fair degree musically, is weak — at one point their sound suggested the seminal punk rocker was not, say, "Search and Destroy," but "Batman Theme" — and Costello ran across his faster numbers, such as "Mystery Dance," so hurriedly his phrasing dissolved and the rhythmic punch of his arrangements collapsed. The coldness of his demeanor — he never cracked a sneer, let alone a smile — made the black humor of his lyrics inaccessible, or irrelevant.
Costello's confidence, however, is not in doubt. He changed his songs radically from set to set, always including a lot of tunes no one had heard before; a sense of repression, perversity, or simply fury was always present. The most striking difference between Costello on record and Costello in the flesh is that the contradictions of his persona stand out much more starkly under the lights: all at once, he communicates the arrogance of the next big thing and the fear of the imposter who's sure he'll be shot before he gets through his third number.
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